Vanitas Still Life Photograph
The flowers I received for my 25th birthday had been sitting around for more than two months when I realised they had decayed into something more interesting than the original bouquet. They became the starting point for a classical vanitas composition, inspired by 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings.
I built the scene from objects associated with the traditional vanitas theme — a skull, candle, books, fruit and dried flowers — but also included my grandfather’s violin, giving the composition a personal connection to the past. What had originally marked a birthday and another year of life had gradually become a reminder of time passing.
Painting with Light
The photograph was carefully assembled and lit in my home studio. I’ve often joked that if someone walked into the room while I was in the middle of setting up one of these compositions, they might think they had stumbled into some kind of cult ritual.
Key light from camera right and a reflector on camera left to create separation for the candlestick. I treated even temporary details as part of the composition, repeatedly extinguishing the candle until I caught the smoke curling through the empty space on the left in a shape that worked with the rest of the frame.
Influence
Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with a Self-portrait is one of the 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings I associate with this style. There is also a clear similarity in how the violin cuts diagonally across the composition.
An example of the vanitas tradition that inspired my photograph.
When I was still deciding what to become, I chose photography partly because drawing and painting seemed less forgiving and much more time-consuming. In a photo, the subject already does most of the work for you. But I’ve always admired painting, and photography became my way of trying to create some of the same kinds of images – only with a camera instead of a brush.
